I think it's fair to say there are other ways to interpret what happened with Elm. What if Evan stopped working on it because he needed to make a living and working on Elm wasn't going to achieve that? In that case, if working on Acadia will earn him a a living, it seems reasonable to believe he will keep working on it.
reply> So even if “open core” is a strictly better model, we lack the intuition and experience to feel confident starting there. By thinking of Elm as the “open core” at first, we give ourselves time to learn and flexibility to expand the core later.
replyhttps://acadia.engineering/license/faq
The way I read this, Acadia is an attempt to finance working on both it and Elm.
That is fair but I think that there’s not a clear thing from Evan we can point to which explains it contributes to the uncertainty in this new project. Makes me feel we should be wary of a repeat. If anything it seems what he learned from his experience with Elm is that the project should not have been open, and his main problem seemed to be community relations. Evan’s reputation precedes him so I’m sure Acadia will be a brilliant technical artifact, but I wouldn’t get burned twice trying to be a member of that community or contributing to it technically.
replyDo you nurse a personal grudge?
replyNo, I don't know Evan and have never personally interacted with him. I'm wary of BDFLs because you can invest in a tool and then that time and energy is wasted if the wind changes.
replyI would make the larger point that I do not like my software to depend on any software with a bus factor of one that I can't control. Elm had this problem and Acadia has it too.
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